Chapter 2

Ginger

 

 

Present Day

 

 

Child presumed dead from drowning.

The words in the police report from the worst night of my life crashed into my skull for the thirty-sixth time in as many years. No matter how long it had been, the anniversary of Cole’s disappearance—or should I say death, if I was being honest with myself—still tormented me. Or maybe I was the one tormenting myself.

The flaps on the cardboard storage box with the word EVIDENCE stamped in large bold red print on the side fell closed. Pulling the box out from the corner of the attic, I coughed at the cloud of dust I had unsettled, then dragged the box toward the dormer window. The June heat collected up here in the attic, saturating my clothes from the dense humidity. Sweat dripped down my forehead, stinging my eyes. Although not much cooler outside, it had to be better than this.

“Southern girls don’t sweat, they glisten.”

The phrase my mama used to say came to mind, though a whiff of my armpits concluded that sweat and glistening smelled equally bad.

Lifting the window open, I sucked in a breath of fresh air, then returned to the dusty box, setting the aged police report back on top of the pile of self-collected “evidence” contained inside. All the police reports over the years. Newspaper clippings spanning four decades. The restraining order I never told anyone about. The obituary that changed my life. The flyer with the 7 Deadnettle Drive house listing that led me to this neighborhood. Candid family photos—but not of my own family. The knife I used to never leave home without…

So many years of secrets were hidden here—my box of secrets. So much emotional baggage jammed into such a small space.

Rooting through the items, I found what I had ventured into the attic for in the first place. Tucked under yellowed photos and crinkled documents, a hint of crimson peeked out. I reached in and grabbed it, shifting the weight of the items aside as I pulled the tiny size 2T red sweatshirt out from underneath. Holding it up, I noticed how the white words Bloodson Beach had begun to peel, reminding me once again how young Cole had been, how long it had been.

Thirty-six years. You’d think I would have stopped coming up here to the attic, the place where my memories hibernated, after a dozen or so anniversaries of my son’s disappearance—death, I again corrected myself—came and went. You’d think I would have allowed myself to forget. Or at least heal. But the guilt wouldn’t let me. Ten minutes of maternal negligence cost me my son, and the blame still gnawed on me. And so I came up here to obsess over the thing I couldn’t control or change.

I could only imagine what a therapist would think of me.

My mama used to tell me I was relentless, just like my father. We redheaded Irish-blooded Mallowans were incapable of surrender. As dogged as the day was long.

“Ginger, when God made you, He gave you an extra helpin’ of stubbornness. One day you’re gonna have to learn to let things go,” she’d say. I never did learn how to heed Mama’s words.

I held the shirt to my chest, letting the sorrow drown out my self-loathing. Tears dripped onto the fabric, still fragrant with the briny tang of ocean water all these years later. Sometimes I just needed a cry, I had tried to explain to Benny countless times when he worried about my mental state. Benny was only four when his brother disappeared, so how could I expect him to understand? But still…it worried him that I needed this. Needed the tears and sorrow and self-loathing once a year to remember the son I never got to raise.

Outside the window I watched dark storm clouds churning overhead, pregnant with rain. While June wasn’t yet hurricane season, the coastal storms sure gave them a good run for their money.

A gust of wind ripped through the attic, startling the papers in the box from their decades of musty slumber. I leaned forward to close the window, glancing down at the street below. A lone figure in a black hoodie stood on the sidewalk of Deadnettle Drive, aptly named considering the purple-flowered weeds that had sprouted up and overtaken my yard. The man faced my home, staring, unmoving.

A mask covered the bottom half of his face, which wasn’t all that unusual even with the COVID restrictions waning, but something felt off about it all. Sinister, even. A chill swept down my spine, and not from the wind that was picking up.

Word had spread around our tight-knit little community that a “lurker” had been spotted watching people’s homes. No one had the guts to approach him, but as I mentioned already, God gave me a rare tenacity—and now, with age, I enjoyed the privilege of saying whatever I liked, unfiltered.

Whoever this lurker was deserved a piece of my mind for scaring old ladies like me. Not that I was that old, no matter what Benny said. Like my daddy used to say, quoting an Irish proverb: “The older the fiddle, the sweeter the tune.” And I still had my wits about me…most of the time.

The lurker appeared rather lanky but was otherwise nondescript, with the hoodie and mask hiding his features. Since the police hadn’t done anything, I figured it was up to me. What did I have to lose? I was safe up here in the attic. Or so I hoped.

Screwing up my courage, I leaned out the window, yelling, “Hey, you! Lurker dude! Trying to get your rocks off, peeping in folks’ windows? Get your deviant ass out of here!”

The lurker stared up at me, affording me a too intimate look at his eyes. Deep and dark and penetrating. And pissed. I heaved the window shut with a shriek of ancient window parts and retreated into the shadows of the attic. After a few moments I tiptoed back to the window, body pressed against the wall, peeking around the frame for a quick glance outside.

The spot where the man had stood was empty. I skimmed further up the street. No one. I pressed my face up to the glass to get a better look at the sidewalk leading up to my porch. And there he stood, directly below me on the walkway, looking straight up at me.

I yelped and jumped back into the shadows of the attic, startled by our unexpected eye contact, as if I had anything to be ashamed of when he was the one who ought to be ashamed.

Had I imagined him? It was a growing concern of mine as Benny kept a running tally of all the things I’d been forgetting. Leaving water running. The stove burner on. Putting metal in the microwave. I had no recollection of these things, which scared the hell out of me. After all, I was only in my late sixties.

Benny hadn’t come out and said so, but I knew he suspected I had early onset dementia, which had plagued my mother around the same age as I was now. Sometimes I could almost feel my mind unraveling…and sometimes it felt as if Benny was pulling the string.

I checked again to find the sidewalk still empty. The sky was a dreary gunmetal gray. It seemed like the storm was centered over my home. I felt like Eeyore, the woebegone donkey in the Winnie-the-Pooh, with a little black raincloud constantly hovering over my head. The storm’s first heavy raindrops began to fall in teasing spurts, then the sky opened up.

Locking the window, I made a mental note to check all the doors and windows tonight before bed. And to warn my next-door neighbor to do the same.

My reflection stared back at me from within the black glass, and for a second I saw thirty-year-old Ginger Mallowan, fiery red hair teased and tortured in emulation of a ridiculous Demi Moore coif that made her head look like a whale spouting water, with bright blue eyeshadow screaming for attention. A blink and the young me was gone, replaced by an aged replica where gray chewed away the auburn, while my nude eyelids sagged into little wrinkled pillows.

I was older and grayer, but at least I still had my eighties fashion sense—and much of my original wardrobe, thanks to my father’s skinny genetics and my mother’s packrat nature—which I’d read in Southern Living had made a comeback.

Good thing I had kept the authentic Def Leppard T-shirt I was currently wearing, the one I’d bought at their Hysteria tour that my friend Janet had dragged me to in hopes of pulling me out of my mental slump, as we traveled across two states to see them perform.

And I had a good feeling my hot pink stirrup pants (which miraculously still fit, although they unfortunately emphasized different curves now) would be all the rage again soon enough. While my flat feet couldn’t squeeze into my old Keds, my basic white Easy Spirits—with the extra arch support old ladies demand!—matched every vibrant color in my vintage wardrobe.

I peered once more out the window, wondering where the lurker had gone. Just as I was thinking this very thing, the glass caught the movement of a figure behind me.

“What are you doing up here?” a voice boomed.

I screamed, stupidly realizing as soon as the sound came out of my mouth that it was Benny’s voice behind me, and not the lurker about to murder me in my own attic. Instinctively shoving the child-sized sweatshirt under Def Leppard, I couldn’t let Benny find me with Cole’s sweatshirt. I’d never hear the end of it, my “fixation on the past.” My “questionable mental state.”

My heart thumped with the pulse of receding fright, the vision of the lurker still hanging in my mind. I imagined the local news broadcasting my sudden disappearance, the headline something along the lines of:

 

Old Lady Ventures into Attic, Never to Return

 

My best friend Tara would head up the investigation, soliciting all of Bloodson Bay’s meager police resources to find me, while Benny would put on a brave face during interviews with local reporters. Of course Benny would want the pity publicity, while Tara worked tirelessly behind the scenes searching for answers. Then one day in a darkly poetic turn of events, someone would find my body crammed amongst the evidence box memorializing my own child’s disappearance, little Cole’s sweatshirt tucked against my rotted corpse.

“Mom? You okay?”

“Yep, I’m fine. All that and a bag of chips!” I turned to face him and smiled, careful to shield his view of the uneven lump of sweatshirt pressed against my chest.

His brown-capped head crested the attic door that opened into the floor. He continued rising until his shoulders were visible, then his entire chest, wrapped in a polyester button-down shirt with orange printed flames climbing up from the bottom seam.

“I really don’t like you being up here.” He grimaced as a cobweb caught hold of his nose, then swiped it away. “There’s a lot of stuff to trip over or get hurt on.”

It was a damn attic, not a boot camp obstacle course.

“I was just tidying up. Seeing what needs to go before you put the house on the market…which, by the way, I really think we need to reconsider doing.”

“Mom, we’ve already talked about this. In fact, I came to find you because you left the stove on…again. You’re really determined to set the house on fire before we sell it, aren’t you?”

I didn’t remember using the stove today, let alone leaving it on. Perhaps that’s why I was in the predicament I was in, a soon-to-be resident of Happy Homes Assisted Living. Though nothing about the facility implied happy or home during our tour among its miserable, moaning, groaning residents.

“I’m just about done up here. I’ll be downstairs shortly.” I waved Benny off, the gesture sending dust motes spinning.

“Okay. Be careful coming down, Mom.”

Benny had started descending through the hole in the floor when he suddenly popped his head back up.

“Oh, and don’t think I don’t know what today is. You won’t be making your annual”—here he made a sour face, as if he’d tasted an unripe persimmon—“pilgrimage this year. Not to mention, the weather’s awful today. I took your car keys…both sets. You’re going to stay put.”

I fought back all the nasty and hurtful things I wanted to say. Best just to play along. “Alright, son. You know best.”

“I’m glad you realize that.”

Once Benny and his eyesore shirt disappeared back into the opening in the floor, I returned to the evidence box, sealing it until next year when I would exhume its contents once again. Unless…I was no longer living in my home, if Benny had his way.

While I was envisioning future summers living beside my best friend Tara, enjoying cookouts in her backyard and iced tea afternoons on my porch, my son was already interviewing real estate agents.

After I shoved my box of secrets back into the corner, I passed the window once more, tossing a final glance outside as rain pelted the glass.

The sidewalk remained empty.

The street remained empty.

Still looking out the window, I shuffled backward across the floorboard when a shadow dashed across my yard, painfully reminiscent of the shadow that had followed me the night Cole disappeared. I felt myself sink into a sea of nightmares as I failed to resist revisiting the past.

I climbed over piles of junk toward the attic door and scrambled down the retractable ladder. Benny thought he was pretty wily, but I had outsmarted him: I had made a duplicate set of car keys just in case he grounded me.

While Benny was piddling around in the kitchen, I yelled to him that I was going to take a nap. I crept into my bedroom and fished the keys out from underneath my bras in my dresser—even Benny wouldn’t dare to snoop there. Then I grabbed my purse and snuck out the front door.

The storm welcomed me in her cold arms. I put the car in reverse and let it roll soundlessly out of the driveway and down the street a ways before cranking it. It would be some time before Benny realized I was gone.

I had to go to the beach house that was rotting away, along with my life. I had to go back, no matter how bad the storm got. That old house needed me as much as I needed it. My life depended on it.